WWE Superstar Roman Reigns Tops PWI 500, Twitter Loses Its Mind

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Credit: WWE.com

Roman Reigns, the embattled star of The New Era, is the No. 1 wrestler in the world. This, according to the annual PWI 500, a list published by Pro Wrestling Illustrated that ranks the 500 best wrestlers from scores of global wrestling promotions.

The WWE Superstar is defined by his polarizing reactions, which are beginning to crystallize into more of a live-event pastime than the toxic vitriol they once represented. Still, many in the small, but loud, Internet Wrestling Community have not taken kindly to the announcement:

PWI 500 evaluates talent from the fiscal year of July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016. Seth Rollins seemed well on his way to topping this list for the second year in a row as he was deep into a WWE World Heavyweight Championship run that abruptly ended in November during injury. From there, Reigns took over, capturing the WWE World Heavyweight Championship on two separate occasions during this span. The second occasion came in the main event of WrestleMania 32, which drew a record-breaking crowd of 101,763 fans. With Reigns in the main event taking on Triple H, the iconic pay-per-view franchise bolstered second quarter revenue by $29.4 million compared to 2015, where WrestleMania occurred during the first quarter.

Reigns' stamp of approval from an independent wrestling magazine that appeals to a largely hardcore fanbase is just more evidence of the former WWE champion's arrival. This is easily PWI's most controversial issue in years, and it all occurred with Reigns' face on the cover. Reigns' ability to illicit a guttural reaction out of a broad base of wrestling fans—from casual to meta—is familiar. His brand of babyface follows in the footsteps of John Cena, who learned to roll with the punches as a different, more realistic, type of good guy who didn't need to turn heel to address negative reactions from a very jaded fanbase. He just needed to simply acknowledge them.